Mwennin
The Mwennin were a small minority culture in the hexarchate. Notable Mwennin characters include Ajewen Cheris, her mother and father, and Moroish Nija. Overview The hexarchate's estimated population of 58,000 Mwennin were already an extinct community by the larger realm's standards.Raven Stratagem, Chapter 13 Their numbers miniscule in the only system in which they were settled,Raven Stratagem, Chapter 1 they were concentrated on Bonepyre,Raven Stratagem, Chapter 13 in scattered communities on the planet's second-largest continent.Raven Stratagem, Chapter 7 The City of Ravens Feasting and the City of Hollow Processions had Mwennin communities. Many old-fashioned Mwennin beliefs, including their calendar, bordered on heresy under the high calendar and were taught and practiced only in secret.Birthdays; Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 20 Among other cultural quirks, the Mwennin predominantly avoided faction service and, unusually for their era, practiced natural birth.Raven Stratagem, Chapter 13 They were not inclined to fancy body-mods. Individual Mwennin tended to live with other family members.Revenant Gun, Epilogue Cultural cuisine included lamb with yogurt sauceRaven Stratagem, Chapter 16, meat pasties, and pastries with poppyseed filling.Hexarchate Stories: Glass Cannon Special birthday pastries were made for clandestine Mwennin birthdays: "fine flaky dough with sweet almond paste and rosewater syrup, or little kumquat candies, goat's milk caramels with little crunchy flecks of pistachios."Birthdays Beliefs The Mwennin had no planet or territory of their own, but a concept of home, called Mwen-denerra ("the scatter-home"), represented the weaving together of the small communities sharing their blood and customs.Raven Stratagem, Chapter 9 Mwennin prayers invoked raven prophets, heron oracles, and the queen of birds in the wood-with-no-boundaries. Though the prayers were forbidden in the hexarchate, devout Mwennin still prayed in secret. Stories and mythology included "the one-eyed saint who kept a casket with no lock, and what became of her lovers" who opened it; "the half-tailed cat who lived in the world's oldest library"; "the raven general who sacrificed a thousand thousand of his soldiers to build a spirit-bridge of birds" for an assault on the heavens;Raven Stratagem, Chapter 16 and saints who left the sea to complete quests, returning afterwards "to feast in their palaces of coral and bone."Cheris and the Sea Mwennin mirror-sorcery folktales involve anything that happens to one person being "mirrored" on anotherHexarchate Stories: Glass Cannon Other customs include luckstone pendants, given to offspring on the birthday corresponding to their birth date. Cheris received her pendant on her twenty-third birthday.Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 2 The Mwennin accept "adoptive" Mwennin who learn their traditions, a custom that helped keep the minority alive despite small numbers of adherents. Ajewen Derow was one, entering the group by marriage.Raven Stratagem, Chapter 16 Language The Mwennin have a language, Mwen-dal, considered a low language in the hexarchate. To an outsider, Mwennin poetry chants sound like "a rapid torrent of sibilants."Raven Stratagem, Chapter 1 Pitch accents are involved in correct pronunciation.Hexarchate Stories: Glass Cannon, p.282 On birthdays, hidden behind closed doors, songs would be sung in archaic Mwen-dal.Birthdays The language also has an impressive array of obscenities.Raven Stratagem, Chapter 27 "For saint's sake" is one of its oaths.Hexarchate Stories: Glass Cannon, p.282 Cheris spoke Mwen-dal exclusively until she entered school, and had an accent in the high language until shedding it in Kel Academy. She no longer speaks it well,Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 20 but used to write to her mother in Mwen-dalRaven Stratagem, Chapter 7 and later as the basis for a code to communicate with Servitor 1491625.Hexarchate Stories: Glass Cannon, p.236 Moroish Nija is a fluent speaker.Raven Stratagem, Chapter 27 Calendar The Mwennin religious calendar, which was suppressed as heretical,Raven Stratagem, Chapter 27 had a list of calendar-saintsRaven Stratagem, Chapter 16 and feast-days.Birthdays Carrion Day celebrated the importance of scavengers.Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 1 Various icons were associated with birthday-saints; Cheris's was represented by a raven.Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 9 Children also had counting-games, risky in the hexarchate but still played in Mwennin ghettos.Birthdays Names In the Mwennin tradition, Cheris would have been named after a saint's day in their calendar. Because of the mortal danger to anyone openly acknowledging a heretical calendar, her parents named her "Cheris" ("twenty-three") for the high calendar day on which she was born.Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 20 History The Mwennin were barely tolerated by the hexarchate, surviving due to their insignificant numbers and secretiveness in practicing their beliefs.Ninefox Gambit, Chapter 20 During the Hafn invasion, the hexarchs authorized the extermination of the Mwennin as an attempt to control Ajewen Cheris. Most of the Mwennin were rounded up by the Vidona and executed.Raven Stratagem, Chapter 16 On secret orders from Hexarch Shuos Mikodez, approximately 5,000 Mwennin were safely evacuated: a small number, but the most the Shuos were able to extract without the operation being exposed.Raven Stratagem, Chapter 27 With Shuos support, the refugees formed a Mwennin settlement on Esrala, an out-of-the-way planet, after the broadcast of the revised calendar. Over the next decade, they began to raise families and accept new settlers.Revenant Gun, Epilogue References Category:Cultures